Person

Heinz Kohut

1913–1981

Austrian-American analyst who founded self psychology.

Ideas

1971 reworked Transference
Describes mirror and idealizing transferences in narcissistic personality disorders.
1971 introduced Narcissistic transference
1971 reworked Denial
Uses Freud’s term disavowal for a ‘vertical split’ in the personality: archaic grandiose demands stay conscious but are walled off from the reality ego and exist side by side with it, unlike the ‘horizontal split’ by which repression keeps them unconscious.
1971 introduced Selfobject
Names as self-objects the archaic objects a person experiences as part of the self rather than as independent centres of initiative.
1971 introduced Grandiose self
Sets the grandiose self beside the idealized parental imago as the two archaic narcissistic configurations revived in analysis; he had first named both in a 1968 paper.

1971 influenced by Heinz Hartmann
Kohut's "The Analysis of the Self" (1971) starts from Hartmann's definition of narcissism as the libidinal investment of the self rather than of the ego, the step from which Kohut's psychology of the self developed.

1974 disputed with Otto F. Kernberg
Kernberg and Kohut disagreed over narcissistic personalities: Kohut saw an arrested but normal line of narcissistic development to be allowed to unfold in the transference, while Kernberg saw a pathological, defensive structure laden with rage and envy that has to be confronted and interpreted.